What unites the many who from, say, August 2016 to August 2026, believed the following:
- The environment is poisoned.
- Forced closures and lock-downs are essential.
- The police are evil.
- Male-to-female trans should play women’s sports.
- Millionaires should not exist.
- Hamas is justified.
- Jason Arday is inspiring.
The issues range widely — from environmentalism to viruses to law enforcement to sex and gender to economics to Middle Eastern politics to academic sociology.
Yet there is an identifiable demographic: Those who believed all of the above propositions, often fervently.
The weird thing is this: When meeting a new person who is a member of this demographic, if one learns their opinion that, say, in 2020 that Covid lockdowns were necessary (virus policy) and in 2023 that Hamas is justified (Middle Eastern religion and politics), then one can almost infallibly predict what their opinion was in July 2026 about Cambridge University’s Jason Arday (Awesome!).
So two questions: (1) What unites those varied beliefs into a package? (2) What communication mechanism causes all members of the demographic get the memo about what their opinion is on those issues?
It is one thing to tell a long story about declining philosophical trends and a shorter story about a generation’s power-play corruption of institutional standards. Is there still a residual to be explained — a psychological type predisposed and then primed to adopt this particular type of package?
More Cambridge scholarship
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol10/iss1/2/
I saw your lecture “Nietzsche perfectly explains the postmodern left” on YT and believe this answer your question. I wish this perspective be shared in politics and other areas of society (outside lectures) because it forces each of us to explore our own motivations and bias.
We need more of you on this perspective!!
I wondered what Perplexity would make of the list. I asked: “what do these people have in common morally, psychologically, politically?” The reply seemed sensible:
Perplexity: “Taken together, these beliefs most likely point to a highly moralized, activist, left-progressive worldview that frames politics in terms of oppression, harm reduction, and group justice rather than neutrality or compromise. The common psychological thread is usually strong concern for victims, high openness to social change, and low trust in established institutions.
Moral pattern – The moral core here is a prioritization of care/harm and fairness over order, authority, or tradition. That means the world is interpreted through suffering, exploitation, and power imbalance, so institutions like police, borders, sports categories, markets, or lockdown policies are judged mainly by whether they protect vulnerable people or enforce domination.
Psychological pattern – Psychologically, this cluster often goes with empathy for perceived victims, intolerance of inequality, and a tendency to see issues in activist or symbolic terms. It can also reflect identity-based moral certainty, where disagreement is experienced less as a policy difference and more as a moral failure.
Political pattern – Politically, these views sit on the radical or far-left end of progressive politics: anti-capitalist on wealth, anti-police or anti-carceral on state power, pro-trans inclusion, and often sympathetic to anti-colonial or anti-state militant causes. The mention of Jason Arday points to admiration for minority achievement and social mobility narratives, which fits the same equity-oriented frame.
Important caveat – This is a pattern, not a diagnosis. People can hold some of these views for different reasons: compassion, peer-group norms, online subculture, resentment of hierarchy, or ideological consistency. But in combination, they usually signal a politics organized around liberation, anti-oppression, and distrust of conventional authority.”
After Perplexity, I wondered if Grok might have an opinion. To the same question, Grok’s reply:
A radical progressive / far-left identitarian (often called “woke,” intersectional progressive, or social-justice oriented), typically high in left-wing authoritarian traits.
These positions form a coherent package rather than random opinions. They align with critical social justice frameworks that view society primarily through hierarchies of oppression (race, sex/gender, class, colonialism) and treat certain institutions and outcomes as illegitimate by default.
Political characterization
Strongly anti-liberal in the classical sense: favours coercive state or institutional power when it serves preferred causes (forced lockdowns, wealth ceilings, policing of speech/identity) while opposing it when directed at favoured groups.
Anti-capitalist to the point of rejecting large private wealth as inherently illegitimate.
Anti-Western / anti-Israel in its radical form: treating Hamas (an explicitly eliminationist, theocratic, terrorist organization) as justified resistance rather than condemning its methods and charter.
Identity-first on sex and race: biological sex is subordinated to gender identity in sports; race/identity narratives (exemplified by finding Jason Arday “inspiring”) take precedence over ordinary standards of evidence or merit. Arday was celebrated as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor with a dramatic overcoming-autism/illiteracy story tied to race, inequality, and neurodiversity work; recent revelations of extensive plagiarism allegations, disputed personal claims, and resignation make continued “inspiration” a loyalty test to the narrative over facts.
Environmental catastrophism + public-health authoritarianism + “police are evil” map onto the post-2010s progressive coalition that fused climate alarm, COVID maximalism, and BLM-style views of law enforcement as systemic violence.
This is not mainstream centre-left social democracy. It is further left, more cultural-revolutionary, and more hostile to liberal norms (individual rights, viewpoint neutrality, biological reality, equal application of rules).
Psychological characterization
Elevated left-wing authoritarianism: preference for coercive conformity to progressive moral norms, punitive attitudes toward dissenters (“police are evil,” millionaires should not exist), and willingness to override ordinary evidence or fairness when it conflicts with the sacred values of the coalition.
Strong system-justifying tendencies for the preferred system (identity hierarchies, equity outcomes) combined with system-delegitimizing tendencies toward existing Western institutions.
Selective empathy and moral circle: high concern for designated victim groups and the environment; low concern for women’s sports fairness, Israeli civilians, or the downstream costs of lockdowns and defund-adjacent policing views.
Preference for narrative and moral clarity over probabilistic or trade-off reasoning. “The environment is poisoned,” “Hamas is justified,” and “trans women belong in women’s sports” function as identity-affirming statements more than falsifiable claims.
Status and belonging motives: adopting the full package signals membership in progressive academic, media, NGO, and activist subcultures where these views are high-status.
Moral characterization
Morality is primarily group-based and equity-oriented rather than individualist or universalist. Fairness is redefined as equalizing outcomes across identity categories; biological sex differences, wealth creation, and national self-defence can be overridden.
Ends-justify-means reasoning appears in the lockdown and Hamas items: extraordinary coercion or violence becomes acceptable if framed as protecting the vulnerable or resisting oppression.
Virtue is demonstrated by public alignment with the most extreme current progressive positions rather than by consistency, empirical accuracy, or concern for unintended consequences.
People who hold most or all of this cluster are over-represented in certain university departments (especially education, sociology, critical theory-adjacent fields), activist organizations, parts of the nonprofit sector, and progressive media. The combination is rarer in the general population and almost absent among classical liberals, conservatives, or traditional social democrats.
All those beliefs represent the philosophy of strong leftist illiberalism.